I'm sure you share my shock at this

Well, the documents have been released, and lo and behold, they don't quite show what Dick Cheney was saying back in the spring they'd show. Here's Spencer Ackerman:

Strikingly, they provide little evidence for Cheney's claims that the "enhanced interrogation" program run by the CIA provided valuable information. In fact, throughout both documents, many passages — though several are incomplete and circumstantial, actually suggest the opposite of Cheney's contention: that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA's interrogations.

The first document, issued by the CIA in July 2004 is about the interrogation of 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 and whom, the newly released CIA Inspector General report on torture details, had his children's lives threatened by an interrogator. None of that abuse is referred to in the publicly released version of the July 2004 document. Instead, we learn from the July 2004 document that not only did the man known as "KSM" largely provide intelligence about "historical plots" pulled off from al-Qaeda, a fair amount of the knowledge he imparted to his interrogators came from his "rolodex" — that is, what intelligence experts call "pocket litter," or the telling documentation found on someone's person when captured.

It should be pointed out that vast passages of the report are blacked out or redacted, so, as Ackerman notes, it is theoretically possible that those passages say that it was only through enhanced interrogation techniques that such-and-such information was gleaned, and indeed thousands of lives were saved. But something tells me that if indeed those passages said that, we'd somehow know about it.